Hellobee Boards

We don’t have a TV but we have talked about everything that’s going almost every day with our 4.5year old. We told him that a police officer killed a black man and now there are protests. We talked about what protest, racism and ally mean. We attended a community vigil that was family friendly on Sunday and talked a lot about things before we went. We centered it on how black people are not treated fairly and why that’s not right. We are trying to keep it simple but we will be having lots of small conversations where we might say the wrong thing but can learn from it and move forward rather than avoiding one big talk where I feel like I have to get everything “right”
Hope this helps. I’m still learning.

I brought it up with my 7 year old. I said something like, "Hey, I want to talk to you about something. You know how you've learned that black people have been discriminated against in the past and that it continues even now? Well, something happened a few days ago in Minnesota (show on map) where a police officer killed a black man which is horrible. And now people all over the country are protesting, holding signs to show they're really upset and want this to never happen again. It's even happening here."

And then we looked up a story on the local public radio station website and saw some pictures of the protests, how they'd shut down the highway and some people were hurt by rubber bullets and tear gas. He asked a couple questions and then ran away to play Prodigy.

I haven't brought it up since. I want him to be aware but I don't feel the need to talk about it all the time. I haven't brought it up with my 4.5 year old yet but probably will soon in a similar way.

I took the same approach as hummusgirl with my 7 year old. just brought it up, answered her questions, let it sit.

Same. We don’t watch any TV and don’t listen to any news around the kids (ages 4 and 6). Similar to those above, I just brought up the topic with my 6 year old. I didn’t speak directly to my 4 year old about it, but he was in the room during our conversation. I think I started with “something really bad happened that I want to talk to you about.” I told him a white police officer killed a black man, probably due to the color of his skin. He has learned about black history in school so he already understands that sometimes people get treated unfairly due to their skin color. I told him that people were now really upset because it was wrong. He asked if the black man was a “bad guy”. I said no, he was a good guy; the police officer did a very wrong thing. We didn’t get into the details about how the man died. Then we all watched a video reading of the book “Something Happened in Our Town.”

One thing I’ve heard lately is not to worry too much about how you talk to your kids - it’s more important that you just talk to them. My kid didn’t seem phased by me randomly bringing it up.

I"m just going to say that you need to bring it up. Black parents don't have a choice - in my opinion, you shouldn't have a choice either. We don't watch TV but we have brought it up in the same way that others have mentioned above. And we don't shy away from having our own conversations about it in front of the kids, either. I distinctly remember my parents have conversations like this in front of me as a kid and I think I learned a lot from them.

@Mrs. Carrot: Same as @peaches1038 - we have one tv and only Netflix and Prime so our four year old hasn’t “seen” any current events but we are definitely talking about them. The beauty of kids is, they never think anything is awkward! Just dive in. It won’t be perfect but it will be good.